I pulled my pants up and then heel-and-toed my way along the wall until I found a corner. With difficulty, I sat down on the floor. I still had my wrists tied and I was still wearing the hood, but the joy of not having to stand up any longer was immense.
Stage one was complete. Now I had to remove the hood and free my wrists. No problem, I thought. If I could get away from that wall, everything else must be a piece of cake.
I lifted my hands to my neck and found the drawstring of the hood. With my hands still bound together at the wrists, it was not easy to untie the knot, and I'd probably tightened it with all my earlier tugging. However, I finally managed to get the string free, and I gratefully pulled the oppressive, fetid cloth over my head. I breathed deeply. The atmosphere in the stable may not have been that fresh, for obvious reasons, but it was a whole lot better than the rancid, vomit-smelling air I'd been breathing for the past thirty-six hours.
I shook my head and pushed my fingers through my hair.
Stage two complete. Now for my hands.
It was too dark to really see how they were tied, but by feeling with my tongue, I worked out that my kidnapper had used the sort of ties that gardeners use to secure bags of garden waste, or saplings to poles. The loose end went through a collar on the other end, and was then pulled tight, very tight, one tie on each wrist inter-looped both with each other and with the chain.
I tried biting my way through the plastic, but it was too tough and my efforts ended with me still tied up, but now with a sore mouth where the free ends of the ties kept sticking into my gums.
I looked around. It may have been dark, but there was just enough light entering for me to see the position of the window. I thought that if I could get outside, I might be able to find something to cut the plastic. But how was I going to get outside with only one leg, and with my wrists tied up?
How about the glass in the window? Could I use that to cut the plastic?
If getting down to the floor had been difficult, it was nothing compared to getting up again. Finally, I was upright, but a cramp in my calf had me hopping around to try to ease it. I leaned on the wall and stretched forwards, and the cramp thankfully subsided.
I hopped along the wall to the window.
It wasn't glass, it was Plexiglas. It would be. I suppose the horses would break glass. The window was actually made of two panes of Plexiglas in wooden frames, one above the other, like a sash window. I slid the bottom pane up. The real outdoor fresh air tasted so sweet.
But now I discovered there was another problem.
The window was covered on the outside by metal bars set about four inches apart. I'd had no food for two days, but even I wasn't yet slim enough to fit through that gap. I rested my head on my arms. I could feel the panic beginning to rise in me again. I was so thirsty, yet I could hear the rain. I held my arms out through the window as far as they would go, but they didn't reach the falling water. There was just enough light for me to see that the roof had an overhang. I would have needed arms six feet long to reach the rain. And to add insult to injury, it began to fall more heavily, beating like a drum against the stable roof.
"Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."
More in hope than expectation, I hopped farther along the wall to the stable doors. As expected, they were bolted. I pushed at them, but unsurprisingly, they didn't shift. I would have stood and kicked them down if only I'd had a second leg to stand on while I did so.
Instead, I slithered down in the corner by the door until I was again sitting on the floor. Wiggling myself into position on my back, I tried to use my left leg to kick the lower section of the door. I kicked as hard as I could, but the door didn't budge. All I managed to do was to slide myself in the other direction across the stone floor.
I gave up and went to sleep.
It was light when I woke, and I could see my prison cell properly for the first time. It was nothing extraordinary, just a regular stable stall with black-painted wooden boarding around the walls, and timber roof beams visible above.
I worked myself back into the corner by the door and sat up, leaning against the wall, to inspect the bindings on my wrists that were beginning to really annoy me.
The black plastic ties looked so thin and flimsy, but try as I might, I couldn't break them. I twisted my wrists first one way then the other, but all that happened was that the plastic dug painfully into my flesh, causing it to bleed. The damned plastic ties seemed totally unaffected.
The length of chain was still attached to the ties. It was gray and looked to me like galvanized steel. There were fifteen links in all, I counted them, each link a little under one inch long with a shiny brass padlock still attaching the end link to the now-unscrewed ring. The chain looked brand-new. No wonder I hadn't been able to break it.
I tried to use the point of the ring to cut through one of the ties, but I couldn't get a proper grip on it and only managed instead to cut through the skin at the base of my thumb as the point slipped off the surface of the plastic.
I looked around the stable for something sharp, or for a rough brick corner, anything I could use to saw my way through my bonds. Up on the wall opposite the window was a salt-lick housing, a metal slot about four inches wide, seven high and one inch deep, into which a block of salt or minerals could be dropped so that, as the name suggested, the horse could lick it. The housing was empty, old and rusting.
I struggled up from the floor and hopped over to it. As I had hoped, the top of the metal slot had been roughened by the rust. I hooked the plastic ties over one of the edges, with a wrist on either side, and sawed back and forth. The plastic was no match for the metal edge, and the tie on my left wrist parted quite easily. Wonderful!
I massaged the flesh, then set about ridding myself completely of the remaining tie around my right wrist and the chain that still hung from it. That task proved a little more difficult, but after a few minutes, I was finally free of the damn things.
Stage three was complete. Now to get out of this stable.
Stable doors are always locked from the outside, whether or not the horse has bolted first, and this one was no exception.
I could just see the locks from the window. The metal bars were bowed away slightly from the frame, and by turning sideways I could use my left eye to see the bolts, top and bottom in the lower door and a single bolt in the upper. All three had been slid fully away from me, and then folded flat.
I took the window bars in my hands and tried to shake them. Not even a quiver. It was as if they were set in concrete.
So there was no easy way out, but I'd hardly expected there to be. No one was going to go to the trouble of shackling me to the wall with a chain and padlock only then to leave the door wide open.
The way out, as I saw it, was to go up.
I could see from the window that the stable where I was imprisoned was just one in a whole line of them that stretched away in both directions. The walls between the individual stalls did not go all the way to the pitched roof; they were the same height as the walls at the front and rear of the building, about nine feet high. So there was a triangular space between the top of the wall and the roof. A wooden roof truss sat on top of the wall, but there was still plenty of room for someone to get through the gap from one stall to the next. All I had to do was climb the wall.
Easy, I thought. There had been walls much higher than this on the assault course at Sandhurst, walls I had been forced to cross time and time again. However, there were some big differences. Either there had been a rope hanging from the top of the wall or there'd been a team of us working together. And I had been much fitter and stronger when at Sandhurst, and, of course, I'd had two feet to work with.